07/08/2014

On a Code of Conduct in Philosophy

[THIS POST HAS BEEN REVISED TO CORRECT MY PRESENTATION OF THE EDITORIAL SITUATION AT NOUS & PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMONOLOGICAL RESEARCH-ES.]

If professional philosophers were serious about a code of conduct they would focus on tackling the conflicts of interests in the profession that are all too common standard operating procedure not just in the relatively low status, albeit potentially lucrative (by philosophers' standards) corners of applied ethics, but also in the ways in which our journals and job-searches (etc.) are run. Many of these conflicts of interests also generate the incentive-structure in which senior scholars have career advancement opportunities to share; this makes an environment of sexual harassment with a whole variety of temptations and blurry lines more common. (I am not claiming they are solely responsible for this behavior!)

Let me explain.

Eleonore Stump and my former NewAPPS colleague, Helen De Cruz, created a petition to call on "the Board of Officers of the American Philosophical Association to produce, by one means or another, a code of conduct and a statement of professional ethics for the academic discipline of philosophy." This petition was signed by 673 peers before it was closed. In response, the American Philosophical Association (hereafter: "APA") "board of officers has authorized a task force to explore whether such a code of conduct is warranted and, if so, to develop one for board approval." [HT Dailynous.]

I am not hopeful about such standards because they tend to become check-lists that, in practice, shield the powerful and well-connected from accountability and, worse, become a tool of oppression against the already marginalized. (See this very important piece at NewAPPS by Leigh M. Johnson and Edward Kazarian!) But if wisely crafted they might do some modest good, especially in the area of sexual harassment and as Brian Leiter put it "on recommending general expectations for faculty-student relations." So, until I see the working drafts I will try to be constructive about the APA's efforts.

When I was still blogging at NewAPPS, I reported on striking conflicts of interest and editorial miscondust at a variety of applied ethics journals especially the American Journal of Bioethics (see Leiter, and a bunch of my posts here, here, here, etc.) and Journal of Business Ethics (recall here). These are not marginal journals in their areas. Or, what to say of those professional philosopher that finds themselves on university ethics oversight committees and that are incapable of bringing themselves to stop, well, a single instance of unethical research (recall Lori Gruen's post). The attitude of many (not all -- and I apologize to the heroic exceptions!) professional philosophers involved, often word-class-ethicists, can be best described as servile, 'do not rock the boat.' (And I promised myself to avoid delving into the global justice gravy train today.)

Was that previous paragraph not civil enough for your taste? Then think about how somebody who might feel personally aggrieved and angry will express themselves about the injustices they have personally experienced (and then to be told to remain calm and civil--Carrie Ichikawa Jenkins has explored these issues during the last few days).

But, of course, this is not about applied ethics. Few philosophy journals live up to best practices elsewhere. Often, the potential conflicts of interests are accompanied with total lack of transparency about editorial procedures, editorial financial incentives, refereeing networks, disclosure requirements, etc. Until quite recently, if not today, two of our most important journals, Philosophical Review and Journal of Philosophy, were in effect, in-house journals that generate very exclusionary publication, citation, and topic patterns. Folk that operate close to these journals claim that they have become less clubby, but the jury is still out. Obviously, 'journal capture' is not unusual in academia, and other important titles in philosophy (fill in your favorite example) seem to have been captured by their own factions. Once I called out Brian Weatherson, an insider at Phil Review, for publicly trying to influence the editorial policy of JPhil. What mattered was not the clumsy attempt, but the thinking behind it unintentionally revealed.

Ernest Sosa (now at Rutgers), is the editor of Nous, Philosophical Issues, and Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. Nous and PPR are both very important and very good journals, and I think most people would argue that Sosa has maintained high quality at both. (Let's leave aside the submission moratoriums in the past). Professor Sosa has edited these journals with impressive integrity Nous since 1999 and PPR since 1983. (I have never heard a complaint!) Even so, it is very bad for the profession that one person has so much editorial influence at the top of our journal-chain for so long already.

Conflicts of interest and the accompanying systematic patterns of exclusion are so routine in our profession that even when they are discussed critically the 'powers at be' simply do not respond knowing full well that they will blow over.*

And for just naming Weatherson and Sosa in this context (and I reiterate: I admire them both as philosophers and I think they represent what's best in the profession), I'll catch so much grief and even my friends will ask me what the 'back-story' is (none!) and a chorus will pontificate, 'how dare you mention Sosa?' And, if I point to the myriad injustices embedded in the Healy-data (which, by the way, also includes Nous, but, it's too impolite to mention that? [for analysis]), well, I'll be told 'of course' a 'code of conduct shouldn't be about journal practices;' we wouldn't want to pollute our pure, disembodied pursuit of truth with ethical concerns!

trust greases the machinery of the discipline (letters of recommendation, referee reports, even hiring decisions); we rely on judgments of others to guide us in some such decision. - See more at: http://digressionsnimpressions.typepad.com/digressionsimpressions/2014/05/trust-and-its-absence-among-philosophers.html#sthash.GpZ5Tlxu.dpuf

As I have said before, trust greases the machinery of the discipline (letters of recommendation, referee reports, hiring decisions, etc.); we rely on judgments of others to guide in our professional decisions. But, to stammer: our incentives and institutional structures do not promote merited trust; they promote clan behavior, and I see many of us struggle to maintain our integrity, if we wish, in light of these.

PS I sent my post to Ernest Sosa. He responded as follows:

I thank you for the kind words, and I understand your concern.

That is why last year, we changed the editorial structure at both journals. Now there is a team of editors at each journal, and each editor has full discretion on the papers that they handle.

It should be clear that we have aimed for balance of various sorts, such as subdisciplinary, gender, institutional, and geographical.

I apologies to Sosa and my readers for presenting a partially out-of-date-analysis of the situation at Nous and PPR.

*Did any journal editor respond to McPherson's charge that "many journals can be expected to continue rewarding pursuits that are unfriendly, in effect, to inquiries more likely to interest many black philosophers?"

Comments

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Thanks for this post. As I've said before, the problems are structural. The profession is too top-heavy. The stars are put in moral danger by the very system that gives them their exalted positions -- I don't know whether I could resist all those temptations, were I in their position. I'm not saying that the majority of stars don't resist; but the discipline is small enough that a few people can make a big impact.

The issue of brute financial rewards illustrates another problem with a top-heavy academic culture. The ranking obsession, as you pointed out in a recent post, has increased salaries at the top. Maybe academic hiring isn't exactly a zero sum game, but it seems plausible that administrators are happy to divert resources to the top and adjunctify at the bottom -- after all this chimes with neoliberal ideology about "top talent". One problem here is that the people with clout are the ones who benefit most from this system, so that it's hard to argue authoritatively against it. Perhaps we need to drive a wedge between our perceptions of skill in philosophy and our perceptions of skill in how philosophy should be run as a profession.

When it comes to publication, I think a simple practical step would be to have more triple-blind journals, i.e. conceal the author's identity from the editors as well as from referees. That's what we implemented at the European Journal of Political Theory, which I just started co-editing. It's actually pleasant and refreshing to look at a paper with less implicit bias baggage.

I'm unconvinced that adding even more levels of anonymity to the journal review-process will do much to remedy the problems that Eric (and others) have noted. And, tbh, I'm also unsure how one could formulate a Code of Ethics "rule" to ensure that blind-reviews are *really* blind. The systematic exclusion and underrepresentation of certain groups that we see in professional Philosophy is, of course, a cultural problem, and the interpretation of whatever rules govern our community will always be filtered through its dominant cultural norms. (See: the last two years of SCOTUS rulings.) So,making a rule that says "journal editors must be neutral, not show favoritism, avoid Googling, etc" is more likely to reinforce the claims of journal editors that they are already doing so than it is to empower those whose "voices" (or arguments, or positions, or traditions) are currently unheard/unseen, because the (alleged) perpetrators are their own judges and juries in this case. That is to say, there's no real separation of powers between our legislative and judicial branches.

And that's just leaving aside for the moment the more important question, I think, which is really about the merits **and demerits** of blindness/neutrality in determining who is seen, heard or read in Philosophy.

This is part of what Ed Kazarian and I were getting at in our post about tone-policing: the danger with codifying norms like these is that it might only further entrench the influence of those who already determine the cultural landscape of our profession, who interpret its governing norms/rules, and who may be unable to see the more broadly deleterious effects of their judgments, which inevitably tend toward maintaining their own privileged positions. To wit, I like Ed's idea of "curatorship" a lot, and I think the various initiatives we've seen over the last couple of years to promote inclusiveness in conference programming, keynote addresses, speaking invitations, etc also provide a really good model for thinking about how blindness/neutrality has its limits as a good.

"'It should be clear that we have aimed for balance of various sorts, such as subdisciplinary, gender, institutional, and geographical.'"

I was about to respond to the quote you cite with: That's nice, truly, though it's also clear what is missing both in the statement and in the lists of editors.

Then I got to your asterisked query at the end. Your "blow over" surmise was correct. I certainly got no response, nor have I encountered any in the blogosphere (even when I directly countered comments from a former editor of Phil Review). At NA and LR I have explored some of the reasons why practical indifference of this sort prevails in a profession that looks and comfortably acts stuck in a Jim Crow time warp.

"Once I called out Brian Weatherson, an insider at Phil Review, for publicly trying to influence the editorial policy of JPhil "

That clearly implies that when Brian tried to influence the editorial policy at JPhil - if indeed that's a good description of what he did - he was an insider at Phil Review. But he had by then long since been gone from Cornell.

Neil, when I wrote the original NewAPPS post, I was aware that Brian had left Cornell and I assume most of my readers were, too. I didn't claim he was still on the editorial Board at Phil Review. Why is it inappropriate to call him an "insider"?
As I point out in my post, you're not allowed to mention the high status men; your response (gotcha fact-checking, but ignoring the substance of the post) illustrates the point I make, and I think of you as one of the folk that at least worries about the issues I raise.